The Grapes of Wrath: Chapter 10

I know it may seem like I say this quite often but this chapter is very important to the development of the story. First, the reader meets some new people; Ruthie, who is twelve years old, Winfield, who is ten years old, Rose of Sharon, who is pregnant, and Connie Rivers, Rose of Sharon’s husband. The family only ends up getting eighteen dollars for all of the things they can’t take, kind of like what the people were experiencing in chapter 9. Then there’s the whole family meeting, the preacher is invited to come along, and then they decide to leave the next morning. So they slaughter and salt the two pigs, pack, Muley shows up for a bit, and then they are ready to leave. Oh yeah, did I forget to mention, they drugged Grandpa and threw him in the back of the truck because he was planning on staying behind, classy.

Thrown into all of this chaos, was a revealing part of the story, perhaps a bit of foreshadowing you could say. One thing that I forgot to mention in my previous blogs is the time that the owners told the tenant farmers that they should go to California for work, but then they even tell the farmers that they are going to trick the farmers coming west from the east coast into buying the nutrient deprived fields (Steinbeck 33-34). It sounded like the same thing the farmers were doing, heading west for better work, but the ones telling them told other people heading west to Oklahoma lies, so it would be logical that they were being lied to about California.

Then, the subject resurfaces in chapter ten when Ma Joad starts worrying to Tom Joad about whether there will actually be a better life in California, and Joad even tells about how one of his former inmates was from California and he was telling stories about how the fruit pickers were basically slaves and there are way too many people looking for work. But they just pass it off as nothing, mostly because they don’t WANT to believe it, and also someone was handing out flyers that said they were in need of jobs (Steinbeck 91). If the flyer says so, it must be true!

Steinbeck, John, and Robert J. DeMott. The Grapes of Wrath. New York: Penguin, 2006. Print.